When she woke again it was lighter. The sun was out, the air smelled good. She went downstairs and Swan and Robert were about to go outside. Swan was standing in the doorway to the side shed. “He's fixing up the guns,” he said. Clara saw tiny flakes in the corners of his eyes but did not rub them out for him. He didn't like her to do that when anyone else was around.
“Did you both eat?” she said.
“Yeah, we ate.” Behind Swan, Robert was cleaning his rifle. He looked up at Clara, frowning. The gun in his hands made him look older. He was thirteen on his last birthday and a handsome, solid boy, with slow eyes and hands. Swan waited in the doorway, pretending to be at ease. He was still a little slight, though she thought he would be growing fast one of these days. He had Lowry's pale, clear blue eyes and something remote and unfathomable in his face, like Lowry, but his silence he had gotten from neither Lowry nor Clara. He had the air of a child perpetually listening to voices around him and voices inside him. Clara wanted to slide her arms around his neck but she knew this would just embarrass him.
“You kids be careful, huh?” she said.
“I'm used to it. I go out all the time,” Robert said.
“What about Swan here?”
“I might not shoot anything,” Swan said nervously. He did not look at her. “I might just go with him.”
“He don't need to shoot anything the first time,” Robert said.
Clara had the idea that there was some tension between the boys, that maybe Robert had been talked into this—but from Robert's polite, slow face you could tell nothing. He was really polite, this thirteen-year-old, and Clara was always surprised by it. He handed Swan his heavy gun and the boy took it, his shoulders drooping just a little in surprise—he didn't remember how heavy the gun was— then he turned away, ready to go out into the shed.
Clara said uncertainly, not knowing if she should say it or not, “Your father never meant to holler at you, Swan.” She was speaking past Robert as if he didn't exist, to Swan's back. Swan did not turn. “If you don't want to shoot the goddamn thing you don't have to.”
The words were so clearly Clara's—they could never have been condoned by Revere—that Robert lifted his eyes to her. He did not quite smile. “He's gonna be all right,” Robert said.
“Mornin, Clara.”
It was a jovial greeting, a mock-country drawl. Judd Revere was not one to naturally call out “Mornin!” with a lopsided grin so you knew you were meant to laugh at him, and with him.
Judd dropped by in the late morning, when Clara was in her garden. She knew the sound of his car: she straightened, and smiled. Judd came around back whistling, hands in his pockets. They were always happy to see each other, a kind of light flashed between them, like a mirror catching sunshine. A quick flash, others might not note.
On his way into town Judd often dropped by the Revere house. He was a landowner, as he called himself, not a worker, the result being that he had no visible work yet worked continually, in his head. From grudging remarks made by Revere, Clara understood that Judd was very smart. Eyes in back of his head.
Clara dabbed at perspiration on her forehead, and brushed at her hair. She was wearing a stiff green straw hat—in fact, a hat Judd had bought for her, on a whim—to shade her eyes. “Well. Looks like he got off to an early start this morning,” Judd said, giving he a faint intonation you could interpret as admiring, or bemused. Judd was a smiler, Clara thought: so much smiling, and his eyes cautious and watchful, tricky. It was said that you would not want to play poker with Judd Revere but if you needed advice, needed help, Judd Revere was the man to come to, for he would not judge you as other men might. He was a tall, loose-jointed man, not at all like Revere. You could tease him and laugh at him and it wouldn't lodge deeply in him as it would with Curt, where any stray word, any unintended and inadvertent insult, would be lodged forever. Clara thought what a shame it was, Judd wasn't good-looking; for he had the ease of a man meant to be good-looking, like Lowry. And it was a worse shame, it filled her with hurt, rage, resentment, that his snobbish bitch of a wife hadn't once called Clara to invite her to visit, though the women lived hardly five miles apart.
When Judd dropped by like this he would always protest he couldn't stay long, he had errands in town, but eventually he would sit with Clara in her new mail-order “lounge” lawn chairs under the willows and Clara fetched him orange juice. “Fresh-squeezed, I did it myself.” Judd would take a big swallow, roll his eyes in a comical yet serious way, and say, “Clara! Delicious.” Then he talked. Judd always had news, whether the news meant much to Clara or not. He could talk about politics and things in the newspaper Clara knew nothing of and he could make them interesting, almost. Beyond his voice she was listening for rifle shots, trying not to be distracted. Trying not to worry. Goddamn she was not going to worry, not one of those mothers who wear themselves out worrying. Needs to be let loose more. Needs more freedom. Clara hoped those tiny little lines she'd been seeing in her forehead had faded, she'd been rubbing at with cold cream. Judd's forehead was crisscrossed with thin lines like cobwebs but that was all right in a man, even Lowry's face had had lines.
“Judd, I like your hair a little long like that. A man looks nice with kind of long hair.” Clara spoke half-teasing and half-serious. He brushed his hair back from his forehead as she said this. She talked at Judd in this fashion, enjoying his company but not worried about it, because he so obviously admired her but would never do anything about it. “How's your little girl?” she said, thinking at once of her little boy who was not so little anymore. “When are you going to bring her over? I like little girls … this next one is going to be a girl.” And she touched her stomach. Judd looked away, strangely fastidious. He said something about his daughter, whose name was Deborah. She was five years old. Clara took little interest in children who were not immediate to her. She could not quite believe in them. So she listened vaguely, inclining her head toward Judd. Her gaze moved on to her legs, which were stretched out in the sunshine, and she saw that Judd looked at them now and then too, as if accidentally, bemusedly. They fell silent. Clara sighed. Then Judd began to talk again, about a problem of his. Revere accused him of being slow and lazy and too kind, but what could he do? It had something to do with business and Clara did not respond. Then he asked her about the porch and she brightened. “Clark is going to do it for me. I made all the plans. Now that my husband owns the lumberyard, all of it, I can get anything I want.…”
“That's very convenient.”
“Clark likes to help me. He's a good boy. Then, next, we might have a swimming pool.”
Judd nodded affably.
“They swim in that lake,” Clara said, making a face. “There are snakes and bloodsuckers there. Garbage fish—carp. What if they cut their feet and get lockjaw?” Though she was thinking of Swan, her Swan; yet she made herself think of the others, too—her stepsons. “So, don't you think—a swimming pool is best?”
“I suppose so, Clara. Sure.”
Like Revere, he seemed scarcely to be listening to her words.
Looking at her. Listening to her voice, and smiling.
Clara said, with an air of pride, “Swan is out hunting now. With his brother Robert.”
“Hunting?”
“I think it's good for a boy to go hunting.”
Judd shrugged. “I never cared for hunting.”
“You didn't?”
“Hell, no. Shooting rabbits, defenseless birds—deer—even if you eat the meat. There's plenty of other things to eat.” Judd wasn't smiling now. “Frankly, I don't like spilling blood. For ‘sport.' Hunters should be on the receiving end of their own bullets, see what it's like.”
Clara thought this over. She liked a man to speak emphatically, and she liked Judd when he seemed to be criticizing, however indirectly, Revere. “Swan talks to you sometimes, doesn't he? Has he ever said anything about hunting? Or—food he eats?”
“What d'you mean?”
“Oh, t
hat Swan! He's so smart, I tell him he's too smart for his own good. Too smart for Eden Valley.” Clara paused, smiling without parting her lips. She liked Judd watching her, listening to her. And he was listening now, she could see. “Swan thinks that eating meat is ‘wrong.' He eats meat, because he has to, in this house; but he feels sickish, he says, sometimes. ‘When you pull the meat from the bone you can see how it was put together.' ‘When you chew beef it's the muscles you feel with your tongue.' ”
“Well. You can't say that your son is mistaken, can you?”
Clara heard, or thought she heard, another gunshot. But when she listened there was only a sound of starlings, raucous and excited in the trees outside the window. “I'm worried sometimes, Swan has such ideas. Like nobody else. Nobody else here. His teacher says he's ‘highly intelligent'—‘with an analytic mind'—or maybe it was ‘analytical mind'? He's more intelligent now than Jonathan, I think. And Jonathan is almost sixteen. See, it used to be that Jonathan was the one who read a lot, adventure books about places like Alaska, Africa, he was interested in Indians, but now it's Swan who likes to read. I'm proud of him, I want him to know things.” Clara spoke dreamily, reaching out to touch Judd's arm with a blade of grass; it was one of her gestures that were seemingly unconscious, unpremeditated. “I want him to read but not if it makes him … strange. Too quiet. Different from the other boys. He's only ten, yet he acts older. When I was ten, I wasn't a child any longer, I had to grow up fast, and I don't want that for my son, god-damn I don't.”
Clara had been speaking urgently. Judd said, “Why are you so worried, Clara? Has something happened?”
“No. And I don't want anything to happen. Like I don't want Swan to remember about me, how I was living when he was little. Before I came here.”
Judd was lighting a cigarette, and he offered her one. Clara guessed that he was thinking of her living alone, Curt Revere's girl-mistress; but really she was thinking of Lowry.
“I want to understand my son when he talks. I don't want to be some damn stupid old woman, that her own son is embarrassed of. Here's a book Swan was reading, I brought out to read for myself.” She pointed, and Judd picked it up.
“A Natural History of Animals. Sounds like something a boy should be reading.”
“Here's another one, I had trouble with—Descent into a—” Clara paused, unwilling to attempt the word. “This Edgar Allan Poe, I heard of. He's famous, huh?”
Judd took up this book as well, thumbing through it. He smiled, but the smile was puzzled, Clara saw.
“A Descent into the Maelstrom and Other Stories. This is tougher going. Not for a ten-year-old, I wouldn't think.”
“You've read it?”
“Some of the stories. But not the ‘Maelstrom.' ”
“What's it about?”
Clara spoke with such childlike eagerness, Judd regretted he could only shrug. “A typical Poe adventure, I guess. Descending into some region like the bottom of the sea, or maybe hell. ‘Hades.' ”
Hades? Clara smiled, not knowing what this was.
She was thinking how in the speckled sunshine Judd didn't look homely as she sometimes thought him. Only just awkward, and worn; not by time, for he was much younger than Revere, but by something like thoughtfulness, thinking. Clara would have liked to slide her warm bare arms around his neck, making a gift of herself to any man, wanting nothing from the exchange except to give pleasure, to make someone happy with no consequences. “I hate it that I don't understand my own son, sometimes.”
Judd smoked his cigarette, exhaling smoke through his nostrils, somberly. “Don't feel bad about it, Clara. It's the same way with us all. We want to understand the people close to us, but we don't want them to understand us. Right?”
Clara laughed, startled. She'd thought that only she, Clara Walpole, was so secret to herself, impenetrable to others.
Judd said, “Having children doesn't change things. It doesn't change you, much.”
“I think it does change you.”
“No. Not really.”
Having children killed my mother Clara wanted to say. Instead she smiled, teasing. “A man, maybe. A man can be a father and hardly know it. But a woman, that's different.”
Judd laughed. “Well, look: my own experience has been that nothing changes essentially, in our souls. Except we become older, and our souls wear thin. I know a hell of a lot more now than I did just a few years ago but I don't know anything that's essential; I have more information, more facts, that's all. I have more money, too. But I'm not a wiser person. It seems to me that nature runs one way, like an hourglass. For most people, everything has been accomplished already—we can't invent, we can't discover, we can't create. We can imitate, that's all. We can fail.” He paused, smoking. Clara had lighted a cigarette when he had, but was too distracted to smoke. “I don't have your husband's legendary energy, I wish to Christ I did. I used to think I'd like to clarify one thing, set one thing in order: I'd like to write one book, get everything into it. Truth, beauty—everything.” He'd dropped Swan's books beside his chair, and poked now at A Descent into the Maelstrom with his foot, with a look of regret. “But I haven't even begun.”
“Write a book?” Clara narrowed her eyes.
“One book. And I'd like to travel, too.”
“To Egypt?”
“Why Egypt? What makes you say that?”
“Oh, Swan has some idea.… There's ‘pyramids' there? Ancient ruins?” Clara smiled hesitantly. “Maybe we could all go, Judd? Sometime?”
Judd shrugged. “Maybe.”
“I've seen pictures of places in Europe, too. Paris. You don't need to speak French, do you? They wouldn't laugh at me, would they?— I mean, my accent.”
Judd shifted uncomfortably. “You don't have an accent, Clara. You speak just fine.”
“Bullshit. I talk like white trash. Soon as I open my mouth in some fancy store in Hamilton, the bitch salesclerks look at me like I'm a bad smell. Even the money I spend, Curt Revere's checking account, doesn't make any difference.”
Judd said vaguely, as if this were a subject he didn't care to pursue, “My wife, now. She hates to travel.”
“So leave her home.”
“Well …”
“My husband is so goddamned busy, he only travels for business. More and more now, it's land he's buying, or selling, or—what's it called—leasing. It used to be farming he did, he says, now it's ‘business.' So he can stay in the U.S. You and I could go, and take Swan.”
“You're teasing, Clara? I guess?”
Judd stared at her, exhaling smoke. For a long awkward moment he seemed unable to speak, as Clara remained silent, stubborn. Let him think what he wanted to think, Clara thought. Unconsciously she was gripping her belly; with this pregnancy she'd hardly gained any weight, yet she felt burdened; not the way she'd felt when she was pregnant with Swan, and in love with Lowry.
“Sure, I'm teasing. Try me.”
“Clara, aren't you—happy here? With—him?”
“Why don't you make me happy, damn you, instead of asking about it? You're always asking, with your eyes. I can feel you asking.”
Judd's face darkened with blood. In his confusion he shook ash from his cigarette, so vigorously the cigarette itself fell into the grass.
“You sound angry, Clara. I don't understand why.”
“Bullshit! You know.”
“You know that he loves you very much. Your husband.”
“So what? What can I do with it, what does it mean to me? And you,” Clara said, contemptuously, “all that time I was living in that house you'd come around and you wanted to make love to me but you didn't—didn't dare! Think I don't know it? Didn't know it? And you could have married me, if you'd wanted to. Revere was married to that wife of his he had to ‘respect,' like he didn't ‘respect' me. And now every day almost you come here and look at me, but the hell with you—”
“Clara, for God's sake. What are you saying?”
They sat in sile
nce. They were both excited, aroused. Clara could not have said if she was happy or deeply unhappy; hopeful, as a wayward child is hopeful, or sullen and defeated and without hope. If Judd had touched her, she might have slapped him. Or she might have gripped him around the neck with her strong, slender arms. Judd was sitting with his face turned from her, shocked and still listening to what she'd said. And at that moment the shot rang out.
A rifle shot, too close to the house.
A moment of silence followed, like the silence after a thunder-clap. Then they heard the screaming begin.
4
It was a Springfield “thirty-caliber” rifle Revere had given him. With a gleaming wooden stock, and most of the long barrel was wood, with polished metal at the tip. The trigger was like a hook, shaped to fit your finger. Swan had stared at the rifle shocked by its size and frightened of it but Revere had said, an edge of annoyance in his voice, that he was old enough, it was time.
He'd made himself smile, as he did when Clara was watching. He'd murmured Thank you, Pa as he knew he should.
He would remember afterward: that was the first false thing.
So many false things, he gave up counting. He hadn't enough fingers on both his hands. Hadn't enough toes! When he'd been smaller, a little boy, he and Clara could giggle over such things, counting fingers and toes. But he wasn't a little boy any longer.